Epilogue
by Warp Ligia Obscura
Summary: The battle with the Eclipse Drivers in Cranagan is over, but the war has just begun. MAJOR SPOILERS.


EPILOGUE

Authored by Warp Ligia Obscura

A/N: For best experience, listen to the eponymous track from _Crysis 2_ while reading.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X

A strangely familiar voice sounded in Hayate's head as she looked down into the depths of the Eclipse ship. "This is it. Finish what I started."

Hayate looked up, then looked down again, before taking the plunge. The world, previously sickly crimson, turned white and she knew no more.

Hayate blinked. Where was she? There was a grey, hazy darkness all around her. It did not look like-

"Hey, dead woman," A voice called out. No, it could not be.

It was. The face, the garments, they belonged to one she had seen die. Had she not?

"Some trip, huh?" Reinforce asked. She smiled thinly. "Thought I'd gone?"

_Yes_, Hayate thought.

"Well – I thought so too." Hayate's sight faded to white again, and when it returned there was a grainy, fuzzy monochrome video of Reinforce raising her right hand to her head, the dark purple glow of a ready buster around it. Oddly, there was a timestamp at one corner. It suddenly changed angle and filled with colour.

The video rippled and distorted. Hayate saw the buster fire again, saw Reinforce's head jerk as she slumped.

"But the suit, man." A vision of Reinforce seated in a full-body cradle entered Hayate's sight. It changed from a frontal angle to sidelong. Odd symbols blinked in and out of existence over it. "Ixpellia was right."

Glaring light suddenly filled the vision, creating a smoky blue tint, and Hayate flinched as it grew in intensity.

"The suit changes all the rules."

The vision was briefly a panning close-up of Reinforce's barrier jacket, and then it zoomed onto a starship. Reinforce stood at one end of it, eyes shut.

The vision zoomed in to show only her eyes. Now they were open, and they were wholly white, not a trace of colour in them.

"They got inside me. The Eclipse Drivers, they got inside."

The vision showed Reinforce with her back to the viewer in an old-looking room and started zooming in on her. Hayate could have sworn that something jumped into her sight part-way, but she could not decipher what she had glimpsed so fleetingly.

"I had to break the link to the suit or lose control for good."

The vision centred on Reinforce's right hand, next to which the runes and sigils of a spell appeared. Reinforce held her hand before herself for a moment, as if studying it.

"And you, you were there – in front of me-"

Reinforce flew down a street, head turning from side to side as if scanning for something. It settled on a Bureau uniform, and a shiver went down Hayate's spine as she recognised whose uniform it was.

To drive the point home, the vision zoomed in on the nametag. **Her** nametag.

"dying in front of me."

Reinforce had picked Hayate up and took her along. Seeing it from the outside felt wrong in ways she had never thought possible.

"Man, I had to take the chance, give you the chance to finish what I started." Reinforce reached for the Tome, and the next sight in the vision was a gloved hand. Hayate's hand. It clenched experimentally.

"It was our only hope." On the dirty floor, Hayate's body twitched.

"Look at that." Reinforce was standing in front of Hayate again, only there were holographs of worlds next to her, glowing turquoise with red spikes here and there. "Not just Mid-Childa, not just Vaizen." She gestured at several of the red spikes. "See, the Eclipse Drivers have been around forever, man, and they built everywhere." She looked back at Hayate. "Everywhere." More white symbols and gibberish filled Hayate's sight, some in red joining them. Eventually, they resolved into first a DNA chain, then six joined hexagons that formed a flower.

All became light again and the now-familiar electronic male growl announced, "Assimilation complete."

There was a building glow, and then a massive explosion. Waves of ice-like shards rushed down the streets of Cranagan. Where it met Eclipse Drivers, they collapsed violently, red innards bursting out. The sky turned a smoggy brown, brightened, darkened. The cycle repeated.

Then there was sunlight again.

On the street, a beat-up Bureau vehicle drove past forlorn debris. It passed by Einhalt and Chrono, who looked up from helping some civilians. As an ambulance drove past, Bureau Air Force vehicles appeared in the sky, and cheers broke out.

Hayate's vision whited out again, and Reinforce's voice re-entered her head. "See, we won here, today. But this thing isn't even close to over. You and me, we don't get to die just yet. We gotta go back. We're needed."

Hayate's sight started returning to normal, though there were still overlays on it, and she shakily took stock of the surroundings.

"Am I reaching the Bureau Ground Forces officer just recovered at Central Park?" A strange voice, the accent vaguely Belkan, sounded in her ears, and she struggled to her feet as the symbols resolved into the HUD of the barrier jacket. "The wearer of Ixpellia's Mariage shell?" There were dead Eclipse Drivers everywhere, and Hayate gingerly avoided the corpses as she picked her way forward. "Wait, I'm adjusting the feed." The HUD started fuzzing again, but eventually regained focus. "Ah, better. Allow me to introduce myself… Olivie Segbrecht, at your service. And you are?"

Hayate clambered up a molehill, only…

Wait. The outfit was wrong, a dark blue short-sleeved vest rather than a white long-sleeved jacket, and the rest of her…

Why was her hair long and silver? Was it not brown and short?

"They call me…"

The camera caught sight of her eyes at last.

They were crimson.

"Reinforce."

X-X-X-X-X-X-X

A/N: So I finally got off my arse, got it done after spending so much time talking about it.

Character correspondence rationales:

Hayate and Rein Eins as Alcatraz and Prophet: Matching the canonical "possession", if you want to call it that, of Hayate by Rein at the end of A's.

Ixpellia as Jacob Hargreave: The WMG GentlemensDame883 posted about Mariage being derived or modded from Ceph nanocytes, that was mine originally. It is true, is it not? Dead men turned into Post-Human Warriors?

Einhalt as Nathan Gould: Einhalt's ancestor, like Dr. Gould's, was a contemporary of Ix/Hargreave.

Chrono as Tara Strickland: Dead father. "I used to be an Enforcer, son. I'll walk on water if I have to." Also, the flipped age dynamic was worth a snort.

Olivie as Karl Ernst Rasch: Completing the trifecta of Old Belkan rulers, and both were (thought) dead.

I wonder who would fit Lockhart: Regius? Gil?


End file.
